


Wind

by Sonora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ahch-To, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Fix-It of Sorts, I don't care what Rian Johnson says because Luke would never give up on his friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 21:11:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13085457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: Luke had no intention of dying in this place, not at first.  It certainly wasn’t his goal when he set out to find the lost planet of the Jedi, the first temple of an Order he barely understands himself.  Decades of research he poured into this project, even before the debacle with Ben, and it was here, he was sure, that he could find the cure.But there’s no help for it now.He's trapped.  Until he gets his sense of the Force back, he's trapped.





	Wind

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a fandom I normally write for, so my apologies if I messed up on major details - this is movie stuff only.
> 
> The Last Jedi made me weep for Luke, and not in a good way. I've been extremely depressed about the entire thing, actually, and... I needed to write this.

One of Luke’s earliest memories is of the pre-dawn wind.

No matter what planet he’s on, what vista is surrounding him, as long as there’s open sky, there’s that wind. The air warming from the night, shedding the quiet of the darkness, the stillness that comes when light fades, the radiation of some distant churning star stirring the world to motion once again.

Luke has never cared for twilight. He’s lived that enough in his life.

But in dawn, in that waking energy, there’s...

Nothing any more.

Here, on Ahch-To, there’s very little land above the surface. Granite peaks, the remnants of long-vanished continents, still struggle to keep their heads above the waves, but they will sink one day. Far in the future, long after the Republic is gone, but it will come.

One of the things the Force taught Luke was the enormity of time. The smear of life across it, the fight to come to the surface and the refusal to sink away into nothingness, rich and vibrant and eternal and oh so fleeting.

He doesn’t dream anymore.

There’s no need. He’s not sure what he’d see if he could. A galaxy he can’t help, no doubt, people he can’t save.

He knows he failed.

He’s lived on this island, waiting for those pre-dawn winds, for far too long. Not long enough to fix himself. Not long enough to get back what he lost.

It’s those moments, these moments, as the twin suns rise above the threshold of the horizon and set the sea to blazing reds, when the darkness fades but the light has not yet reasserted itself, that he can still feel the Force. 

It’s these moments when he feels like he could reach out his one good hand and take himself back. Heal what shattered in him. Raise his X-wing from the water. Find his sister. Beg her forgiveness for his failure.

Those pre-dawn winds have always been trying to tell him something. 

One of these days, he knows, it’ll finally reveal itself to him.

+++++

Luke had no intention of dying in this place, not at first. It certainly wasn’t his goal when he set out to find the lost planet of the Jedi, the first temple of an Order he barely understands himself. Decades of research he poured into this project, even before the debacle with Ben, and it was here, he was sure, that he could find the cure.

But there’s no help for it now. 

He's trapped. Until he gets his sense of the Force back, he's trapped.

Ahch-To is almost entirely water, pole to pole. A small world on the far edges of the livable galaxy, unknown to most even in the Outer Rim, it’s tethered to a rogue star that’s been drifting farther and farther from the galactic core for millennia. 

There was nothing particularly special about it, at first glance. Luke had been able to map the surface in only a few days, and there were less than a dozen places on the entire planet that contained flat enough ground of sufficient size to land an X-wing. That surface life was limited - sea birds, grasses, a few species of pinnipeds that sunned themselves on the torturous rocks above the surf line. 

But he found the temple. 

He found the place where the Jedi Order was born.

It was entirely by accident - the will of the Force perhaps, if the Force could still listen to him - that he found himself there. The sea here was prone to heavy fog that rolled in from nowhere, and he got caught in one such bank almost without warning out on his last patrol. No light, no visibility, and without Force-enhanced reaction time, exhaustion wearing on him, Luke pulled up a little too late to miss a sudden cliff and lost control.

He was too low to pull out of the flat spin in time. 

He hit the surface

He had seconds before the cockpit would short out, he knew, and punched in one last desperate message; his coordinates. One last transmission, and hoped that this would work. That this years-long quest, the knowledge of this place, would mean something. 

He was glad he had not brought R2 along.

The swim to the surface had been harrowing, and a vicious reminder of what the final confrontation with Ben Solo had cost him. Without the Force to buoy him, it had been far more of a struggle. He only barely managed to get himself and his gear bags to the surface. Four trips down into the freezing water he'd had to take to get his survival kit, the last requiring a harrowing squeeze under the fuselage to get into the compartment where his translation equipment was stored; the extra little bit of distance had been enough to blow out an eardrum.

Bleeding and tired, he’d dragged himself up an ancient stone path and collapsed on the first flat space he’d found.

If he could regain his connection to the Force, he figured right before he passed out, he could raise it again.

He would have to.

Leia needed him. The Republic needed him. 

When he’d come to, there were a number of small creatures chattering at him. Amphibious caretakers of the island, there were always a few around. Where they lived and where they went - for sometimes new one came and the old departed - Luke never rightly knew. He couldn’t remember seeing them during his survey. He never did get fully familiar with their speech. But they treated him well, getting him up to the beehives that first night, feeding him and drying out his clothes above a fire they lit, and when he asked about the Jedi, they pointed him towards a tree.

That tree. 

The library he had come to find.

Written in a long-dead language not even the best translation computers in the galaxy could decipher.

And for the first time since he set out from the ruins of his temple on this quest, Luke feels despair.

He indulges it for a moment. Then takes it back to the cliffsides of this knife-edge island and lets the wind carry it away.

He came here for this. 

He has work to do.

+++++

In the solitude of Ahch-To’s ocean winds, Luke remembers.

He remembers what it was like to feel the Force.

He’s not arrogant enough to think it’s abandoned him. While he has breath in his body, it lives in him, like it lives in everything. But he can’t touch any more, can’t feel the slightly magnetic pulse of it between outstretched fingers, or reach across it to tell Leia that he’s alright, he’s home, he’s where things began.

He remembers what it felt like to have the whole living world an extension of himself, to push himself through the space that exists between sub-atomic particles and feel not emptiness but fullness. He remembers the beauty of the song , the background radiation of the universe a chorus that can fill your mind until you weep from the majesty of it all. 

He remembers what it was like to crush a guard’s throat with a mere thought and feel the pulse go dead against his palms and realize just how seductive being the _end_ can be.

He remembers a midwife placing a new little life in his arms, downy hair snagging against his battle-roughened fingertips. He remembers marveling, realizing, for the first time just how fragile, how miraculous, they really were.

He remembers Han beaming with pride in his firstborn. _We really did it this time, didn’t we?_ he says, and in Luke’ memory, Leia laughs.

He remembers Leia passing a little hand into his. _Be brave for Uncle Luke,_ she tells her boy. _We love you so much._

He remembers running his hand across the cornerstone of the Temple, taken from the ruins on Coruscant and brought to Naboo, the homeworld he and Leia had never known Peaceful, rich in life, relatively quiet. Ben tugged at his trouser leg. _What is this place, Uncle?_ he asked, and Luke had looked up to the night sky and told him _this is where we give the galaxy her peace back._

He remembers trying.

He remembers failing.

But Luke remembers his family the most. 

As long as he’s got breath in him, he’s not giving up. Not on them. Never on them.

He remembers so much, but he can’t move forward. He can’t find what he needs. He can’t go back until he does, and he has to get back. 

Luke doesn’t need the Force to tell him that whatever his nephew is up to back in the civilized world, it’s not good. It can’t be.

+++++

The only reliable chronometer Luke has is his own failing body. Aging. 

A Jedi is above such things. 

But he’s not a Jedi anymore. Not in any practical sense.

He couldn’t save one student. Couldn’t teach one student. Couldn’t keep his own flesh and blood from falling.

It’s not uncomfortable here. The sea is rich; he doesn’t lack in food. The beehives are good shelters. The winters are not unbearable, and the summers are not too hot. The caretakers help him when he asks, but he doesn’t speak much these days.

He walks every path on the island. Finds the cave beneath, the presence of the dark side that lingers in the shadows. He meditates in the cliffside chamber, swathed in the light of the noon suns. He pours over the books, working page by laborious page to understand what they’re saying, what wisdom there might bring him bak together.

Ben’s damage is subtle, but undeniable. 

And it is killing him. This island cares for him, but it is killing him too.

Luke is beginning to think he’s going to die here.

Unless that last transmission wormed its ways through thousands of lightyears of relays and repeaters, back to Leia or Han or a student who escaped the final slaughter, or anybody.

Luke is beginning to think...

Until the Millennium Falcon shows up.

Until some slip of a girl is holding his lightsaber back out to him, as if that was the only point to all of this.

+++++

Luke doesn’t dislike Rey.

He can’t give her what she needs from him. Mostly because she doesn’t know what she needs, only what she wants, and wasn’t that just the thing that got Ben in so much trouble?

She tells him an insane story. A story he wouldn’t believe if he hadn’t known Ben personally, worried about him. That one was always more interested in the Dark Side, or at least, in the notion that their family bloodline was superior, capable of embracing some new notion of the Force, one in which there was no Light and no Dark but some in-between place. Thinking that you could live in some gray area between the light and the dark. That’s what Ben was after. Enthralled by his own cleverness, and he slaughtered for it.

The idea seemed madness to Luke, but Ben had been quite taken with it. 

Ben wanted power. The trappings. The flash. The appearance.

That’s what this one wants too.

Power.

The power to win. 

Luke wonders, briefly, if this is another vergence. Another attempt by the Force to correct a gross imbalance.

He’s not sure what he can do for her. Even if that’s not the case.

She’s demanding. She’s begging. 

But whatever she might be, wherever she might have comes from, she seems sincere enough. Yearning for the Light, even though she doesn’t seem to understand the first thing about what that means or what that is.

“Ben killed his father?” he asks at the end of her tale, remembering that little baby again. That earnest little face, trying to be brave even as Leia left. 

Rey nods.

Luke takes a few breaths to steady himself. “We start in the morning.”

He sends her back down to the Falcon, and waits until she’s well down the path before collapsing.

Han’s dead.

Han is dead.

And he wasn’t there to say goodbye.

+++++

She’s a clever girl, this one, and far too adept at the Force to be anything other than suspicious. The raw strength in her slight frame is frightening, like Ben’s was, and she’s channeling the same thing. But if Ben was the twilight, she’s the dawn, that young wind off the ocean, and there’s something comforting in that.

She’s impulsive, though. A scrapper, and while that’s normally a fine quality, Luke worries about seeing it in a prospective Jedi. 

_Wars not make one great_

He’s learned the truth of that here on Ahch-To. 

There’s more to this than moving rocks. 

There are deeper truths in the Force, in the living world, than swinging a lightsaber around. It makes for fine theater, of course, but it means nothing in the end. Killing comes as easily to living things as breathing. Living, it seems, is the harder task. 

It has been a long time since Luke had anyone to carry on a conversation with, and Leia has not been here to bounce his discoveries off of. He doesn’t quite know how to put any of this into words. 

Rey wants practical advice.

But simply fighting Ben isn’t going to do her any good at all.

It’s not her job to finish this.

It’s his.

“You shut yourself off from the Force,” she tells him after he tries to get her to feel the _life_ , rather than the power. 

“Not exactly,” he replies.

+++++

Decades on, and Luke is still not entirely sure what happened that night in his temple. 

_We don’t need any of this, Uncle!_ Ben had declared loftily, with all the arrogance of youth, in what had seemed like just another of their private conversations. _Light Side, Dark Side, it’s all the same!_

_It is fundamentally not._

_You act as if the power of the Dark Side is wrong, immoral. But you told me once yourself, you used it to defeat Lord Vader..._

_Force of arms, strength in battle, perhaps. But it wasn’t until I rejected it that I defeated him. And even then, it was not about sticking a blade through him._

_But Uncle..._

_It was not until he accepted the Light again that he was redeemed, Ben._

_Oh, you mean when he died?_

_Ben, I do not know how else to explain to you, the strength you feel in the Dark Side is worthless..._

_No, Uncle. You’re worthless. He’s told me so._

“I never found out who the _he_ Ben spoke of was,” Luke admits to Rey that evening, a fire roaring in the pit outside the beehives. “But whoever it was, I have to believe he is the one who inspired Ben to do what he did. Killed the rest of the students, the ones who wouldn’t join him, and tore the Temple apart.”

Rey is watching him carefully. “And your powers?”

Luke sighs. “Rey, it is not my power, nor is it yours, or Ben’s.”

“Then your sense of it? What happened?”

“I was told it took a rescue crew three days to reach me through the rubble. I woke in a hospital bed, feeling nothing,” he says quietly. “There was nothing. It was as if the entire universe had ceased to exist for me. That thing you spoke of, inside you,” and he taps her chest. “That is gone for me.”

“Perhaps it’s Supreme Leader Snoke?” she asks.

“Snoke the leader of the First Order, the one you told me about?”

She nods.

Luke shrugs. “I don’t know. Perhaps there are some Sith lords still wandering around the galaxy, but I think it was Ben. When I looked inside of him, it wasn’t the darkness I saw. It was a longing for it, a slide into it, but he couldn’t commit to it. He was trying to cling to so twilight state, like he could have everything without making a choice. Without having to commit himself.” Rey’s just watching him. He stirs the fire. “Perhaps in trying to save him from his everything, I left nothingness in myself.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Rey, you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in years. You’ll have to forgive me if my vocabulary’s a little off.”

“Is it possible to carry the Light and Dark side of the Force inside yourself?”

“I don’t think so,” Luke tells her honestly. “Which is why your little episode in the cave today is so alarming to me. It’s calling to you, isn’t it, the Dark Side?”

‘What should I say?”

“You’re the only person who knows who you are,” he replies. “Start there.”

She’s quiet. For a long time, she’s quiet.

“Will you come back and fight with us?”

What she wants, he can’t give.

She leaves that night. With Chewy - who doesn’t come to say goodbye, so he’s either angry or doesn’t know about it either.

She also takes the books with her.

+++++

Luke dreams that night. The first dream he’s had since his Temple was destroyed.

He dreams of Master Yoda. Not on Dagoba though. Here. On Ahch-To. On this island. In the library, in the sacred tree.

“Know how to heal yourself, you do,” his master says, and pokes him with his stick. “Old books, need you do not.”

“Master Yoda, my sense of the Force... I cannot feel it.”

“Little Ben, shut you down, did he?” And Yoda chuckles. “How does one so weak attack so strong a Jedi master, hmm?”

“He has power, Master Yoda, power like...”

“Power like the dusk or like the dawn,” Yoda says. “Fades. Passing through, nothing real, nothing to carry one forward. Light or Dark there are. Truths, these are, no matter the trappings. Old books you need to tell you these things? The Light is not in those. The light is in here.” And he jabs Luke with his walking stick, square in the chest. “Have you everything you need, you do.”

Luke had hoped once, as he stood on Endor and watched the flickering embers of the celebration fires carry into the night sky, that evil was gone.

That the Dark Side had been defeated. That there was nothing left to fight. That he could simply rebuild the Jedi and the peace of the Old Republic would come roaring back.

And perhaps that was the problem.

Choosing legends over life. Substituting that lifelong struggle just to _be_ for the stories that are told about those long dead and gone.

Perhaps that was why Ben had turned to his twilight, his rejection of duality in the search for some kind of meaning to things, to answer why Leia had sent him away so young or why he was training or why anything that was, was.

Night turns to day turns to night turns to day. 

That’s balance. 

The ebb and the flow.

Balance isn’t grayness. It’s not compromise. It’s not about equivalencies. It’s not desperately straddling the knife edge’s between anger and love. It’s about moving forward, out of uncertainty, out of that cynical desire to be right without error, without risk. 

Balance is making the choice. 

And this is the thing that Ben never understood. The lesson Luke never taught his nephew, because he perhaps never understood it himself. Not until Ahch-To. 

The Dark is only ever an absence of life.

The Light returns.

The Light always returns. 

It has to. Or there would be nothing, nothing at all - Ben’s world, perhaps and what a hideous place that would be.

Luke can’t let that happen.

Luke knows he can’t let that happen.

He sets the tree on fire. 

Books gone, it has no purpose now but to tie him to this place.

He’s needed elsewhere.

As the flames lick the sky, he breathes in the smoke and feels something in him stir again.

+++++

Standing there in the dawn winds whipping down from the eastern cliffs, Luke lifts his eyes from the deep water below him to the twin suns rising above the rim of this ocean world. The world where his heritage was born. A world whose secrets aren’t bound in leather and paper but the roll of the waves and the cry of the sea birds and the struggle of the grass just to stay rooted to the rocky shoreline.

This isn’t a place to stop.

This isn’t a time to end.

This isn’t where he gives up.

This isn't where the story - the myth, the legend, the _inspiration_ \- of Luke Skywalker dies.

So Luke stretches out his good hand above the waves. Reaches out with his feelings. Lets himself flow into the wind that’s carrying this ancient world into a new day. 

Beneath the waves, his X-wing stirs.


End file.
